Sacrificing your game in the altar of streamlining.

[Sectan]

While i do agree with everything you said about WoW , the amount of money they got from that game alone is more than enough to compensate for losing the initial fanbase . So i think WoW is more of an exception . When dumbing down a game grants you billions of dollars ...

True, but for me that only makes it worse. I don't believe dev teams should be slaves to every whim of the playerbase - that can only ever end badly - but Blizzard really do treat WoW players with at best indifference and at worst contempt, like when they ignored constant pleas for server mergers on underpopulated/unbalanced realms for literally years. It's like "yeah, piss off if you don't like it, there's another million suckers waiting to take your place."

It's weird - I used to enjoy time spent in WoW but I was never truly dedicated to it as some are, and yet whenever I read one of Ghostcrawler's posts about his vision of the game (which was the only one that counted and fuck anyone who thought differently) I wanted to strangle the arrogant sod.

Here's the thing. If they merged servers then poor old struggling Blizzard wouldn't earn money from people not having to server transfer! THINK OF THE COMPANIES FOR GOODNESS SAKE! Why fix something when you have have your players PAY YOU to do nothing. Blizzard always got a little bit under my skin in that way. Although they always do a good job restoring the items when I got hacked a few times.

Oh what were we talking about, Streamlining? Can't think of anything off the top of my head besides a few of the already given examples.

 

[Vegosiux]

I always understood that "streamlining" is reducing the artificial difficulty of the game, not the objective difficulty. E.g., making the interface more intuitive, making the camera behave in a more user-friendly way.

It's not "real" difficulty if half of the difficulty stems from you fighting against the interface and the camera, as opposed to actual challenges the game is throwing at you. I mean, sure, it's even grounds for everyone playing with an unmodded interface, but that's not what's supposed to make the game challenging.